Painting of artist's mother aged 100 wins BP Portrait Award

A former teacher has become the oldest winner of the £25,000 BP Portrait Award
- with a painting of her 100-year-old mother's corpse.

Last portrait of mother by Daphne ToddPhoto: DAPHNE TODD/PA

7:30AM BST 23 Jun 2010

Daphne Todd, 63, clinched the runner-up prize in 1984 but stopped applying when she turned 40 because she was over the age limit.

When organisers decided to scrap the upper age cap in 2007, Todd, whose ''devotional study'' of her mother Annie Mary Todd was painted at the undertakers, applied again.

Speaking just before the winner was announced, Todd, whose previous subjects have included Spike Milligan and mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker, said: ''I'd be more than amazed if I won. Just getting in is good because it shows I can still hack it against the young ones.

''I'm not expecting to win. I'm sure that they are making a gesture by having me in the shortlist, I'm the token elderly person,'' she said.

Todd, whose painting, Last Portrait of Mother, shows her subject propped up in the refrigerated room of the undertaker's funeral parlour, said she thought she might not be perceived as ''cutting edge'' enough to win.

She said of painting her dead mother: ''In some ways it was easier (than other portraits). She kept still. I was just aware that I didn't have much time. I had to do it very quickly.

''Usually with a commission you have coffee breaks but I worked solidly for three days. I thought I ought to stop when she began to change colour but the undertaker said he would have been happy for me to do another day.''

Todd's mother, who was living with her daughter on her farm in East Sussex, had given permission for the portrait around a year before she died in April last year.

The artist, who wins a commission worth £4,000 as well as a £25,000 cheque, attended the Slade School of Fine Art and was the first woman president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Of sponsors BP, she added: ''They are getting rather a bad press (because of the oil spill) at the moment.

''But what these firms do (arts sponsorship) is amazing. When I won the second prize it opened up doors. It gave me a royal commission (painting the Grand Duke of Luxembourg) straight away and meant I could give up teaching. Suddenly I could charge for every portrait.''